Using the tool

• Build my Pool — four questions, then it draws your plan and plays it back.
• Load Sample Plans — start from a ready-made scenario and explore from there.
• The buttons along the bottom — Add, Grant, Vest, Exercise, Forfeit, Lapse, Sell. Each one moves options one step. A button greys out when there is nothing left for it to move.
• Every number is editable. Click any figure on screen, type a new one, press Enter. The whole pool is recalculated around it, and an impossible number is refused with the reason.
• Play the journey — replays your plan from zero, one step at a time, with a line of commentary for each.
• Undo — step back one action at a time, or export the plan to CSV.

Every box in the Tree view

• Active plan pool — options still live in the plan. Total Pool minus everything exercised, because exercising takes options out of the pool for good.
• Active granted — granted to people and not yet gone. Splits into Unvested and Net vested.
• Available to grant — headroom. What is left in the pool for people you have not hired yet.
• Unvested — promised, not yet earned.
• Net vested — earned and still usable. Not yet exercised, not forfeited.
• Exercised — bought as shares, shown net of anything already sold. Sell some and this number drops. Total Exercised in the top strip keeps the lifetime figure.
• Forfeited — earned options given up, usually on leaving. Back into Available to grant.
• Lapsed — options that fell away before they were ever earned. Also back into Available to grant.
• Sale — shares sold for money: at IPO, in an acquisition, in a secondary round, or to a dedicated ESOP fund.

Options and shares are two different things

This is where most ESOP confusion starts. An option is a right to buy a share later. It lives inside the pool, and the pool is finite. The moment someone exercises, that option is destroyed and a share is created. The share is not in the pool at all. So nothing that happens to it afterwards — selling it, an IPO, an acquisition — can change your pool numbers. Watch Active plan pool while you press Sell: it does not move.

Forfeited and Lapsed are not the same

Forfeited applies to options that had already been earned and were then given up.Lapsed applies to options that fell away before they were ever earned, so nobody ever owned them. Both return to Available to grant in this tool. Plan documents do not all use these two words the same way, and whether options are recycled at all is a choice your plan document makes — it is always the final word.